The most successful businesses are those with confidence in their ability to store, access and use data effectively. Rather than focusing on the nuts and bolts of storage, this view point looks at the data it holds and more importantly, what can be done with it.

This review looks at why small businesses need to stop being complacent about their networks and at what they can do to maintain their competitive edge as they follow the big boys down the route of increasing collaboration and other bandwidth-hungry applications likely to impact on network performance and availability.

IBM Watson is ushering in epoch-making change

Big Blue predicts industry is on the cusp of computers that learn

JERUSALEM: The computing industry is entering a new era as devices move from merely being programmable to become responsive, learning systems, according to a senior IBM executive.

Tom Rosamilia, vice president of corporate strategy, said that tools like the firm's Watson system mark this shift to cognitive systems that could have a huge impact on the corporate world.

"From the late 1960s until now, we were living in the programmable era, where we could add logic and software to systems and do things that we're still doing now and that's not going to disappear," he said at the HTIA conference in Israel.

"But now we're at the beginning of the cognitive systems era and the difference is that, while we haven't created machines that can think - not yet - we are creating ones that can learn, that can ingest data and understand it."

As part of this change in computing, Rosamilia also touched on the importance of mobile devices to enterprise.

In particular, he cited the firm's push to offer management tools in this space and hinted the firm may make more acquisitions in this area.

"We already have Worklight in the mobile device management space and there is a lot of opportunity to do more in this area of how firms can manage devices," he said.

On the issue of cloud computing, Rosamilla revealed IBM is now managing 4,000 engagements for customers, and handled some 4.5 million daily client transactions on its cloud, helping revenues grow almost threefold in recent years.